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Phase IV: A New Hope

What if Saul Bass had designed the opening titles for Star Wars? (Is there anything you can't find on YouTube?)

Send in the Clowns

A few months ago, poking around on the IMDB page for The Day the Clown Cried (that never-released object of ridicule that just won't go away), I noticed an unexpected name on the cast list: Serge Gainsbourg. What?! The glorious sleazebag of French pop found his way into a Jerry Lewis Holocaust movie? I tried to rationalize it—part of the movie was shot in Paris, where Gainsbourg lived, and in that same period (the early '70s) he did have small parts in awful movies like Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye. But his girlfriend Jane Birkin was the star of Seven Deaths, so his being in it made sense, and there's no record anywhere else of him appearing in Clown. So it was obviously an IMDB prank, right? I needed to know for sure. I decided to plunk my own unlikely actor into the Clown cast list and see what would happen.

And that's how Orson Welles joined the cast of The Day the Clown Cried, playing an elusive American named Harry Lime. It's on his IMDB page, so it must be true.

POSTSCRIPT: It's a week later, and Welles is no longer on the Clown cast list. But Gainsbourg still is. Thoughts, anyone?

In Absentia

A reader writes: "Hey Levi, I know you have a kid and all, but that can't be eating up all your time. Some new content, please..." Fair enough. I'll try to account for my absence here these past two months. I could say that I was bummed into silence by the sudden death of my former neighbor, and that would be partly true. Or that the few movies I've managed to see in theaters weren't inspiring (oh, Romero! Did you have to take your zombies the way of Redacted?), but that would be brushing off 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I could admit that, as I do most winters, I've taken on some kind of obsessive hibernatory pursuit; this year it's trying to watch every last film noir I haven't seen. Yeah, I'm serious: the DVR is backed up with TCM recordings (including the Very! First! Noir! Stranger on the Third Floor, which I, uh, haven't gotten around to), and the Netflix queue is clogged with titles like I Wake Up Screaming and Cause for Alarm. I could whine that my newish job is hogging my attention (at least I'm shepherding pieces like this one and this one into the world).

I could say all those things. Or I could just confess that my wife and I are working our way through the first four seasons of The Wire, and hope that you understand.